Rises Above Expectations - Career Choice Network Book Review

By John Edwards

Ask your boss if you can start working from home. If you follow Tim's instructions and your boss refuses to let you work from home - just quit your job, you're meant to be an entrepreneur - brilliant!

I'd wager that the vast majority of newcomers to this business invest large amounts of time, lose money, and quit. In the end it's just like any other business - if you want to succeed doing this kind of stuff, the "secret" is hard work and perseverance. Also some tasks are not appropriately done by outsourcing, I can understand some tasks like researching a book might be done well that way, but you don't want to do everything that way. Did you know that if the trends of the last two centuries hold, everyone's workweek will be four hours by 2407" But it can be done. It seems this book recognizes symptoms of contemporary American life. There is a small percentage of people doing this that are making very large sums of money, but it's NOT easy and requires huge amounts of time, money, knowledge, and more. Contrary to the way the author characterizes these things, none of them are easy: SEO (search engine optimization), profitable affiliate marketing, profitable pay-per-click advertising, profitable website creation, profitable information product creation.

As for creating a new lifestyle, well this book applies if you already have money to burn and resources to fall back on and can afford to receive the pink slip that will surely come your way if you deal with people - particularly managers - as the author suggests. This book is just another 'sleight of hand' of the sort he brags of throughout.

Most by my count could never have achieved the things they did in life if they followed his examples. The most glaring thing he pointed out was he hired an assistant. It became very clear that some people really truly believe that working few hours on work you hate to free up time for more productive and meaningful life activities is somehow "immoral." I guess the Puritanical mentality this country started out with (earliest settlers here) has seeped deeper into our overall culture than we once imagined.

But the remaining 80 percent contains fiction and travel advice. This book was a good read, and had some helpful ideas, but it really wasn't as helpful as I'd hoped. Granted he may be saying not all can quit or want to quit their jobs and offering ideas on how to be more productive. He uses quotes from a lot of famous hardworking successful people to justify his points. But Mr Ferriss admonishes them for not taking him up on it. I applaud them for seeing through the curtain at the man pulling the levers.

Like another reviewer said, "life is short"....why waste your time and money re-reading the same material twice. Want a life changing book" He achieves a 4-hour workweek by simply skimming the cream of a business model that any one of two billion literate people can implement at some level. Are we to believe this business model will be highly profitable for the next several years" It was during this portion of the book that I realized two things. Tim Ferriss was not the type of person I wanted to look up to. This book gets off to a good start, by making the valid (if trite) points that one should not defer all gratification indefinitely; and making money should not be an end in itself, but rather a means towards making it possible for you to do the things that you want to do. It also offers some useful (if basic) ways to save time, such as not checking email constantly, but rather dealing with it all at once at fixed (and not too frequent) times.

About the Author:

Those four people, even if they read this book, will probably throw it in the fire. Portable Gas Grills.